Academic honesty is easy to miss in any scientific field when politics is involved, but people need to realize social sciences cannot continuously provide data that is significant and maintains high predictive power. It is much easier to predict one’s sample then the whole population and as long as one’s data has a p less than .005 it is publishable. Also, the effect size does not show the accuracy of predictions across the population, but the size of the population the data will be most accurate. The mind is very unpredictable and an outlier in your sample that seems insignificant could be unexpectedly amplified through the entire population or, more likely, amplified when one uses that data to predict for entire continents, nations, or creeds. Also, be careful not to be swayed by example shoehorned to fit anothers agenda. In all likeliness though… Evo Psyc people are probably not checking for nuisance variables, skewed data, or the academically dishonest amongst their own.

First, Evo Psych is a very misleading field. Psychology itself is very difficult to study considering how complex human consciousness is let alone adding biological evolution into the mix. Second, it is not true psychology to say a physical change in the brain causes any mental process. It should be called Evo Neurology. The job of a psychologist is not to understand biological source of human behavior, cognition, etc. It is to use patterns and recognition to identify and understand the human condition. A real Evo Psyc type science might find the historical start of a behavior and all the places it begins, ends, changes over… MILLIONS of years i.e. my third point… EVOLUTION. A true Eco Psyc would have the same limitations as anthropologists. Written and verbal evidence can only go so far… can we truly put Evolution infront of Psychology? This science was dead before it was conceived. Here comes the big point… Evo Psyc cannot be used to compare men and women and it would be ridiculous to do so when normal psyc has already done this (I don’t have a direct citation for this, but google or a academic journal catalog should suffice. Psychology’s ability to recognize differences in gender based psychology is common sense really). I liked the article anyway… I agree that Evo Psyc had some good points, but they were things that other social fields could answer without biological or evolutionary evidence. I put to anyone, not just Carrier and Bowie, that any argument for or against feminism is void under these condition that Evo Psyc has no means to provide evidence to support either claim.

Not my area. That’s a question for Myers perhaps.

What is your take on the debate between group selection and individual selection? It seems to me that they reduce to each other, as any group selection will necessarily have to occur on the basis of variations within populations of individuals.

Richard Martin

I’m interested in what you mean by the “first set of predictions.” I think examples would help people get what you mean.

The first set of predictions seem to be generally well founded. The only problem is that they are not specific to evolutionary ‘psychology’, they are just standard results of evolutionary theory that were proposed long before evo psych was proposed as a separate field.

I have yet to see an example of an evo-psych result of the second type that wasn’t specious. And what I find most insulting here is the claim by certain of their supporters that you have to understand the evo psych field to be able to see why their results are valid. No, that is absolutely bogus. If someone is proposing a scientific theory they have to be able to justify it to the scientific community at large, not just a small in crowd. That is one of the constraints that keeps scientists honest.

I don’t see any predictive power to the evo-psych theories. When anyone puts forward a theory in the social sciences that has little predictive power but significant political consequences, it is time to call bullshit.

Okay.

I agree that makes little sense. 1 Clement was far more likely written in the 60s. I make this point myself in OHJ, pp. 271-73 (in Ch. 7.6).

There are no sound arguments for dating it later, IMO. Not even to its “traditional” date of 95 A.D., which is based on ancient legend and conjecture. Whereas, as you note (and I add several other evidences besides), that’s wholly implausible from its content.